Post by Ninmast on Apr 4, 2009 10:43:58 GMT -5
The detective raised another cigarette to his lips and dug out his lighter. Immediately, the cheap stench permeated the air as its red light glowed against his black skin, a feat that would have been impossible if we hadn't been back behind the flood lights focused on the grave site. “Two exhumed bodies in one night,” he mused sarcastically with a drag on the cancer stick. “Man, I love this job ...”
I had been at the earlier one with him, as well. It had been a middle-aged man two months dead of what had thought to be natural causes. As I thought back on it, I realized I couldn't recall a lot of the details, even though it had been only a couple hours ago. Perhaps it was the late night, or perhaps I just hadn't been paying as much attention as I thought I had. I wasn't with the police, not in any official capacity, and to be honest, I didn't know if I was there in any capacity at all. The detective had simply requested I come. I knew nothing about the case, I knew nothing about the victims, and when I'd ask the detective why he wanted me here, he'd just say he had a feeling they'd need a man of God around. I had jokingly suggested he try the local diocese. That was when I found out the detective did not make jokes about his hunches, especially whenever they ventured into the realm of the supernatural. He was not a superstitious man, so such circumstances were treated by him to be very grave, indeed. No pun intended to our present surroundings.
The crane lifted the casket free of the ground as men guided it over to an on-site clean room and slid it in through an opening on the side. One of them came over to us, some of his mud-slicked face lost as he stepped past the flood lights into our shared darkness. He reached up and wiped away some of the sweat from his brow, resulting in another unseen streak of graveyard soil across it. “Your girl's all ready for questioning, detective,” he told the large officer. “If you wouldn't mind making it quick, we'd appreciate it. The guys've all got a nasty feeling about all this and we'd like to get six feet of dirt back between us and her as soon as possible.”
As if to restrain his temper, the detective took another pull on his cigarette, causing the end to flare and highlight his rocky face. “It's a dead body, Princeton,” he answered flatly. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“With all due respect, sir,” the man answered with a face as straight as any sane man I had ever seen, “we've dug up a lot of dead bodies, and none of them ever felt like this before.”
The detective glanced at me as if expecting some sort of feedback, but I had no idea what he was looking for and his eyes soon departed, pinning themselves instead to the door of the clean room and pulling his tired feet in that direction. “You're in luck, then, Princeton,” he was saying as he took one last pull from his cigarette before flicking it away outside the clean room's entrance. “We shouldn't be long.” He turned to the door and called to the doctors within. “You about ready in there?”
“Almost,” they answered, their words obscured by their protective breathing apparattii. “We need to vent first before we let you in.”
“What for?” he asked indignantly. “She's been dead for three months! That should have all vented by now!”
“It hasn't,” was all they answered. “High levels of various organic chemicals still remain. None of them actually deadly, but they'd mess with your head. Stand back.”
Obediently, we all did so. Some, like the detective, continued breathing normally once out of “range,” but I held my breath all the same until I passed through the resulting burst of air as the seal broke and circulated and I moved over to one of the large, soft plastic windows where I could get a look at the body without going in. I would be able to hear everything, as it was in no way sound proof and it would be happening right in front of me.
The body was a shriveled thing, a skeleton with browned skin covering it, most muscles still present but diminished to near shapelessness, only enough to keep there from being nothing but bones, and there was still some sparse hair on the head. “So that's what killing yourself with a pint of strawberry cyanide milk will do to you,” I mused passively.
They had taken her out of the casket and set her body on one of the two cots that were on either side of the small room. As the detective entered the room, he took one once-over of the body, himself. “Miss Meyer, I'm with the police department,” he said as if it were any other typical interrogation, his own way of breaking the ice in this situation as he moved over to the other cot and sat down across from her head. “I apologize for disturbing you at this hour, but we'd like to ask you a few questions about a man you knew, name was Morrison.”
The doctors were smiling at his bedside manner as they gathered their tools, but stopped almost immediately as we all went white as a sheet, because Miss Susan Meyer answered.
“He's dead,” she spoke, her mouth moving and the words pronounced as normally as if she weren't a whithered husk who no longer possessed soft tissue such as a tongue. “Died two, three days ago. But you already know that, detective. You even know how. You just came to me to look for confirmation.”
Well, all of us but that stony detective. The doctors looked about ready to drop their tools and run, but he just arched an eyebrow, his face not even blanched. “Talkative little wren, aren't you?”
She looked at me through the plastic window. She had no eyes and the only indication was a slight turn of the horridly decayed head, but the feeling of eyes upon me was so intense as to be unquestionable, that squirming feeling that made you feel like you were in the way, and, despite what should have been an impossible act of dexterity considering her degraded physical condition, and, as I would later consider, the fact that she was DEAD, though at the moment, considering we were carrying on a conversation with her, that seemed a small impediment, anyway, despite this, she sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the cot like any normal, living, breathing human woman.
I had the overbearing impression that I had offended her somehow, perhaps by staring at her so. Whether or not she was dead, if she was cognizant, she deserved the respect one would offer another human being and I dipped my head. “Sorry, did I disturb you?”
That head turned back toward me, moving again with a smoothness that should have been impossible, and she smiled, an expression that, while no doubt soothing to the eyes in life, was only indicated by the pulling away of taut skin that split like seams in the process, exposing more of her yellowed, pitting teeth. “You dug me up and hauled me out of bed,” she stated as if it were a stupid question to ask. “Of course you disturbed me. You meant to ask if you offended me. You have the look of one who's never seen a naked woman, even if I am not currently a sufficient example.” She spoke with her hands, moving them in motions to aid in communication. These movements, too, cracked dried, shriveled skin and tore muscles that had long since lost the capacity to hold tension, though she took no note of it and neither did it impede her. “Am I offended? No. Disappointed might be a better word.” She ran a bony hand down a stiff once-shapely leg whose now-spindly form crackled indignantly under the motion. “Do you like what you see?”
It took no effort to keep my face straight. I now knew what we were dealing with here, why I was brought along. Though the detective was not a believer and neither had any way of knowing what would happen, he had a hunch. Something had touched him with caution, to be prepared for an unordinary night. We weren't dealing with Susan Meyer, not really. No, this was a wolf in sheep's skin, or rather, a demon in a corpse's skin, and the only sensation aroused was disgust. “I'm taken,” I said flatly.
“Oh?” she asked. “She's not the one I set you up with.” She acted as if she expected me to know who she was speaking of, but of course it made no sense.
I merely smiled in response. “I don't know who you're referring to,” I said as I moved to pull back a flap that had fallen into my field of view, “but I speak of my Lord Jesus Christ.” But when I pulled the flap back, the room inside was empty and it was daylight, a wind kicking up through the area. Immediately, the sensation of oppression imposed itself upon my chest, like a pressure placed against it. There was a loose support pipe in the tarpaulin that hung off one side of the clean room for propping up an exterior space against rain and sun and I pulled it out on impulse, as one might arm himself with whatever was handy when expecting a fight.
When I turned about, there was a woman standing beside me. She was a solid six to eight inches shorter and dressed in black clothes, like one might wear to a funeral. Her ebon hair was well brushed and hung down below her shoulders. Though I had never seen her before, her appearance struck a chord of familiarity. “... Susan?” I asked.
“He's here,” was her response, and it was clear from the tension in her voice she wasn't speaking of the same person I had mentioned, nor did her voice hold the smoothness that had been present in the demon that had been using her corpse. She directed me ahead and as we went, the empty field that had been a graveyard in the deep of night began to fill with other things, like that which comes out of a fog as one moves deeper into it, and as it did so, the clean room behind us became lost in it.
What came out of the fog was a playground, full of various stations, such as slides, swings, monkey bars, poles and tire swings. Children were on these things, but they did not play. They simply sat or stood on their implements of choice and stared with blank, empty gazes at us as we approached. I recognized some of these faces. Their pictures were on the missing children's board at the police station. I had the sudden impression that the ones I recognized within this place of ghostly fog were no longer missing, and the epiphany sent a chill down my spine that even the detective wouldn't have been able to dismiss to the wind that had continued to increase in strength as we walked, yet still failed to touch the fog in the area.
My hand tightened on the tent pole in my hand and the increasing pressure that pressed inwards found its match as my heart burst in fury. “Demon!” I shouted to the silent playground. “Do you think to intimidate me with the trophies of your butchery? The theft of my Lord's children?” I whipped around and clashed my pole against the metal support of a climbing stand. “You enrage us! You infuriate us! Show yourself, blasphemous one! In the name of Christ, I demand it!”
The wind suddenly stopped, and in some way, that was worse than its presence, for with its presence, there was movement, there was sound. Without it, there was nothing, no noise, no movement, not even the creaking of chains from the still tire swings. Through the fog, another figure approached. At first, he seemed clothed in a black cloak that wrapped all around him so as to block any defining characteristics, but as he came closer, more details became clear. It was not a black cloak, but much more modern attire. He wore a black sweater hoodie with the hood raised and the letters of some college team or another stamped across the chest, matched with black jeans that bore no fade from washing or smattering of dirt. They were as black as black could be, and I was stricken by the image of present-day he presented.
“Like a modern day … what do you call yourself?” I asked. “Damian? Devon, perhaps?”
He gave me a knowing smile as he lowered his hood, revealing a very modern face of a man perhaps in his college years with short but not quite buzzed bleach blonde hair and rectangle-lensed glasses perched on a common nose in front of ice blue eyes. “Michael,” he answered.
“Cute,” was my sarcastic response. I then asked the first question that came to mind. “Where will we find the children?”
The smile remained as he walked calmly past, plucking a pole of his own from an unstrung volleyball court like one might pluck a blade of grass. “The detective,” he emphasized, “will find them in the basement of a run-down old house a valley over.” He came to a stop on the opposite side of a net that was actually up and gripped the pole firmly in both hands. “You won't be with him.”
So that was it. He intended to kill me. I went to move to one side of the net, to go beyond the bounds of the field, and quick as lightning, his pole swung about and snapped against my shoulder and I reeled back into the middle, my staggering as I gripped it sending me to the other side, upon which it again whipped around and struck my other side in my upper arm. Again, I found myself directly across from him and I narrowed my eyes against the pain.
But my expression only made him laugh. “What's wrong, haven't you ever played volleyball?” he asked. “You're SUPPOSED to STAY inside the LINES!” Each emphasized word was punctuated by a precise thrust through the squares of the netting, the first striking me in my left shoulder, the second in my right, and the third catching me in the middle of the forehead with a blow that brought tears to my eyes and made it impossible to focus beyond the splintering lights of pain that danced before them.
I thought I heard Meyer gasp and as I clenched my eyes shut, I could feel something wet trickling down the side of my nose. He had hit me with the hollow end of the pipe and the effect was probably not unlike a cookie cutter on dough. That would explain the piercing agony that was drilling against my skull. I braced myself against my own pole as I forced myself back into a standing position, holding it for several seconds before daring to open my eyes and focus on what was beyond the pain. Fortunately, it had the advantage of making the other pains vanish, as I would later find out that my left shoulder, receiving two blows to the right's one, had been broken in several places, and I wouldn't have been able to do what I did next.
At first, it was nothing spectacular. On impulse, I recited the first verse that came to mind, from Psalms 23. I knew it better than almost any other section of the Bible because of an old quilt I once had hanging over my bed as a child that bore its content. Even still, the piercing pain in my forehead made it difficult to recall. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The man's laugh had evaporated and his knowing smile had degenerated into a hateful scowl as the wind picked up again. “He maketh me to lay own in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters, he restoreth my soul. He leadeth me down the path's of righteousness for his name's sake.”
Susan was clawing at her face in agony. “Stop it!” she cried. “Stop it! You're scaring me!” Her begging was like that of a frightened child.
“There's no reason to be scared,” I answered. “For Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.” The wind intensified to near hurricane pitch as the man's scowl deepened, intent on drowning me out and I raised my voice to shout over it. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me!” Despite the winds and despite the pain and despite the blood lifted from my forehead by the forces rushing about me, I stood straight as I lifted that pole above my head in both hands, and though I no doubt looked like some sort of fool, bleeding profusely from my forehead with a tent pole above my head like King Arthur just drawing Excalibur, for that moment, I knew the elation of Moses as he raised his staff above the Red Sea with all the forces of the Pharaoh riding the wind, itself, to bear down on him, to stop him, and knowing it was futile, that they'd never make it. “Thou shalt preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies! Thou shalt annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over!” Above the wind, Susan's cries of agony were the only thing that could be heard, pained pleadings for mercy, for cessation, for pity, but though she grabbed for me, grappled in a vain attempt to bring my arms down, her beautiful face rapidly degenerating in the wind to that dried, dead husk, her screaming never ceasing, she could not stop me. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall live and dwell in the house of the Lord forever!” The wind buffeted me like a thousand fists from giants, pummeling me without mercy, but they could not stop me. With force greater than they could muster, I brought that plain, unassuming tent pole down on the netting between us. “AMEN!”
It shattered like a pane of glass, scattering in all directions, and like a chain reaction, so did Susan, the hooded man and the whole playground of fog and I collapsed against the side of the clean room as the force left me.
From inside the room, I heard the detective swear and he rushed out the door and over to me, all the while demanding, “What the hell did you do?” over and over again. It made me laugh the laugh of the exhausted. The moment he got hold of me, however, it changed, and the next reiteration came out, “What the hell did you do to your forehead?”
It wasn't until he mentioned it that I realized it was still bleeding. I reached up tiredly and ran a finger over the bridge of my nose and drew it back to examine the red mess before letting out another tired laugh. “I think I'm going to need stitches,” I observed.
“No shit, Sherlock,” he muttered angrily before wheeling on the doctors. “I'm done here. Get what you need and get that bitch back in the ground. I'm taking him to the hospital.”
As he walked me over to the squad car and got me inside, it occurred to me that they were morticians, more used to working on the dead than the living, or at least the animated. “She won't give them any trouble over it, will she?” I asked.
But he just scoffed. “Soon as you brought up your god, you both collapsed. She's deader 'n a doornail. I half expected the same of you when you went down with her.”
I stared ahead at the gravel road the headlights shined upon as he started up the engine. “That's all that happened?” I asked confoundedly.
“Yeah,” he answered irritably as he dug out a tissue and handed it to me. “Clamp this on that thing before you bleed all over the car. What the hell did you think happened?”
I gave another one of those tired laughs, though why, I had no idea. What I was about to say wasn't remotely funny. “I found the kids,” I said, as if I expected that to explain it all.
Of course, he just looked at me like the hole in my head had knocked a screw loose. “What kids?”
“The ones that are missing,” I explained. “They're all over that bulletin board back at the station. I know where they are.”
The detective swore again. “You sure?” he demanded. When I nodded, he yanked up the radio, but I put my free hand over his arm. I didn't say anything, but after a moment, he got the idea and clipped the radio back in. “Well, then, I guess it can wait until tomorrow … I've had my fill of the dead for one night ...”
The next day, he went to the next valley over from the graveyard, and in the basement of an old, run-down house that nobody had been in for the better part of the last century, he found the children strung up and quartered like deer from the ceiling.
He had no doubt wanted me to come with him, because he called my house that morning several times. I didn't answer, though, because when I had gotten back home that night, on an impulse I would never have the opportunity to understand, I enjoyed the first glass of strawberry milk I had had in twenty years.
I had been at the earlier one with him, as well. It had been a middle-aged man two months dead of what had thought to be natural causes. As I thought back on it, I realized I couldn't recall a lot of the details, even though it had been only a couple hours ago. Perhaps it was the late night, or perhaps I just hadn't been paying as much attention as I thought I had. I wasn't with the police, not in any official capacity, and to be honest, I didn't know if I was there in any capacity at all. The detective had simply requested I come. I knew nothing about the case, I knew nothing about the victims, and when I'd ask the detective why he wanted me here, he'd just say he had a feeling they'd need a man of God around. I had jokingly suggested he try the local diocese. That was when I found out the detective did not make jokes about his hunches, especially whenever they ventured into the realm of the supernatural. He was not a superstitious man, so such circumstances were treated by him to be very grave, indeed. No pun intended to our present surroundings.
The crane lifted the casket free of the ground as men guided it over to an on-site clean room and slid it in through an opening on the side. One of them came over to us, some of his mud-slicked face lost as he stepped past the flood lights into our shared darkness. He reached up and wiped away some of the sweat from his brow, resulting in another unseen streak of graveyard soil across it. “Your girl's all ready for questioning, detective,” he told the large officer. “If you wouldn't mind making it quick, we'd appreciate it. The guys've all got a nasty feeling about all this and we'd like to get six feet of dirt back between us and her as soon as possible.”
As if to restrain his temper, the detective took another pull on his cigarette, causing the end to flare and highlight his rocky face. “It's a dead body, Princeton,” he answered flatly. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“With all due respect, sir,” the man answered with a face as straight as any sane man I had ever seen, “we've dug up a lot of dead bodies, and none of them ever felt like this before.”
The detective glanced at me as if expecting some sort of feedback, but I had no idea what he was looking for and his eyes soon departed, pinning themselves instead to the door of the clean room and pulling his tired feet in that direction. “You're in luck, then, Princeton,” he was saying as he took one last pull from his cigarette before flicking it away outside the clean room's entrance. “We shouldn't be long.” He turned to the door and called to the doctors within. “You about ready in there?”
“Almost,” they answered, their words obscured by their protective breathing apparattii. “We need to vent first before we let you in.”
“What for?” he asked indignantly. “She's been dead for three months! That should have all vented by now!”
“It hasn't,” was all they answered. “High levels of various organic chemicals still remain. None of them actually deadly, but they'd mess with your head. Stand back.”
Obediently, we all did so. Some, like the detective, continued breathing normally once out of “range,” but I held my breath all the same until I passed through the resulting burst of air as the seal broke and circulated and I moved over to one of the large, soft plastic windows where I could get a look at the body without going in. I would be able to hear everything, as it was in no way sound proof and it would be happening right in front of me.
The body was a shriveled thing, a skeleton with browned skin covering it, most muscles still present but diminished to near shapelessness, only enough to keep there from being nothing but bones, and there was still some sparse hair on the head. “So that's what killing yourself with a pint of strawberry cyanide milk will do to you,” I mused passively.
They had taken her out of the casket and set her body on one of the two cots that were on either side of the small room. As the detective entered the room, he took one once-over of the body, himself. “Miss Meyer, I'm with the police department,” he said as if it were any other typical interrogation, his own way of breaking the ice in this situation as he moved over to the other cot and sat down across from her head. “I apologize for disturbing you at this hour, but we'd like to ask you a few questions about a man you knew, name was Morrison.”
The doctors were smiling at his bedside manner as they gathered their tools, but stopped almost immediately as we all went white as a sheet, because Miss Susan Meyer answered.
“He's dead,” she spoke, her mouth moving and the words pronounced as normally as if she weren't a whithered husk who no longer possessed soft tissue such as a tongue. “Died two, three days ago. But you already know that, detective. You even know how. You just came to me to look for confirmation.”
Well, all of us but that stony detective. The doctors looked about ready to drop their tools and run, but he just arched an eyebrow, his face not even blanched. “Talkative little wren, aren't you?”
She looked at me through the plastic window. She had no eyes and the only indication was a slight turn of the horridly decayed head, but the feeling of eyes upon me was so intense as to be unquestionable, that squirming feeling that made you feel like you were in the way, and, despite what should have been an impossible act of dexterity considering her degraded physical condition, and, as I would later consider, the fact that she was DEAD, though at the moment, considering we were carrying on a conversation with her, that seemed a small impediment, anyway, despite this, she sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the cot like any normal, living, breathing human woman.
I had the overbearing impression that I had offended her somehow, perhaps by staring at her so. Whether or not she was dead, if she was cognizant, she deserved the respect one would offer another human being and I dipped my head. “Sorry, did I disturb you?”
That head turned back toward me, moving again with a smoothness that should have been impossible, and she smiled, an expression that, while no doubt soothing to the eyes in life, was only indicated by the pulling away of taut skin that split like seams in the process, exposing more of her yellowed, pitting teeth. “You dug me up and hauled me out of bed,” she stated as if it were a stupid question to ask. “Of course you disturbed me. You meant to ask if you offended me. You have the look of one who's never seen a naked woman, even if I am not currently a sufficient example.” She spoke with her hands, moving them in motions to aid in communication. These movements, too, cracked dried, shriveled skin and tore muscles that had long since lost the capacity to hold tension, though she took no note of it and neither did it impede her. “Am I offended? No. Disappointed might be a better word.” She ran a bony hand down a stiff once-shapely leg whose now-spindly form crackled indignantly under the motion. “Do you like what you see?”
It took no effort to keep my face straight. I now knew what we were dealing with here, why I was brought along. Though the detective was not a believer and neither had any way of knowing what would happen, he had a hunch. Something had touched him with caution, to be prepared for an unordinary night. We weren't dealing with Susan Meyer, not really. No, this was a wolf in sheep's skin, or rather, a demon in a corpse's skin, and the only sensation aroused was disgust. “I'm taken,” I said flatly.
“Oh?” she asked. “She's not the one I set you up with.” She acted as if she expected me to know who she was speaking of, but of course it made no sense.
I merely smiled in response. “I don't know who you're referring to,” I said as I moved to pull back a flap that had fallen into my field of view, “but I speak of my Lord Jesus Christ.” But when I pulled the flap back, the room inside was empty and it was daylight, a wind kicking up through the area. Immediately, the sensation of oppression imposed itself upon my chest, like a pressure placed against it. There was a loose support pipe in the tarpaulin that hung off one side of the clean room for propping up an exterior space against rain and sun and I pulled it out on impulse, as one might arm himself with whatever was handy when expecting a fight.
When I turned about, there was a woman standing beside me. She was a solid six to eight inches shorter and dressed in black clothes, like one might wear to a funeral. Her ebon hair was well brushed and hung down below her shoulders. Though I had never seen her before, her appearance struck a chord of familiarity. “... Susan?” I asked.
“He's here,” was her response, and it was clear from the tension in her voice she wasn't speaking of the same person I had mentioned, nor did her voice hold the smoothness that had been present in the demon that had been using her corpse. She directed me ahead and as we went, the empty field that had been a graveyard in the deep of night began to fill with other things, like that which comes out of a fog as one moves deeper into it, and as it did so, the clean room behind us became lost in it.
What came out of the fog was a playground, full of various stations, such as slides, swings, monkey bars, poles and tire swings. Children were on these things, but they did not play. They simply sat or stood on their implements of choice and stared with blank, empty gazes at us as we approached. I recognized some of these faces. Their pictures were on the missing children's board at the police station. I had the sudden impression that the ones I recognized within this place of ghostly fog were no longer missing, and the epiphany sent a chill down my spine that even the detective wouldn't have been able to dismiss to the wind that had continued to increase in strength as we walked, yet still failed to touch the fog in the area.
My hand tightened on the tent pole in my hand and the increasing pressure that pressed inwards found its match as my heart burst in fury. “Demon!” I shouted to the silent playground. “Do you think to intimidate me with the trophies of your butchery? The theft of my Lord's children?” I whipped around and clashed my pole against the metal support of a climbing stand. “You enrage us! You infuriate us! Show yourself, blasphemous one! In the name of Christ, I demand it!”
The wind suddenly stopped, and in some way, that was worse than its presence, for with its presence, there was movement, there was sound. Without it, there was nothing, no noise, no movement, not even the creaking of chains from the still tire swings. Through the fog, another figure approached. At first, he seemed clothed in a black cloak that wrapped all around him so as to block any defining characteristics, but as he came closer, more details became clear. It was not a black cloak, but much more modern attire. He wore a black sweater hoodie with the hood raised and the letters of some college team or another stamped across the chest, matched with black jeans that bore no fade from washing or smattering of dirt. They were as black as black could be, and I was stricken by the image of present-day he presented.
“Like a modern day … what do you call yourself?” I asked. “Damian? Devon, perhaps?”
He gave me a knowing smile as he lowered his hood, revealing a very modern face of a man perhaps in his college years with short but not quite buzzed bleach blonde hair and rectangle-lensed glasses perched on a common nose in front of ice blue eyes. “Michael,” he answered.
“Cute,” was my sarcastic response. I then asked the first question that came to mind. “Where will we find the children?”
The smile remained as he walked calmly past, plucking a pole of his own from an unstrung volleyball court like one might pluck a blade of grass. “The detective,” he emphasized, “will find them in the basement of a run-down old house a valley over.” He came to a stop on the opposite side of a net that was actually up and gripped the pole firmly in both hands. “You won't be with him.”
So that was it. He intended to kill me. I went to move to one side of the net, to go beyond the bounds of the field, and quick as lightning, his pole swung about and snapped against my shoulder and I reeled back into the middle, my staggering as I gripped it sending me to the other side, upon which it again whipped around and struck my other side in my upper arm. Again, I found myself directly across from him and I narrowed my eyes against the pain.
But my expression only made him laugh. “What's wrong, haven't you ever played volleyball?” he asked. “You're SUPPOSED to STAY inside the LINES!” Each emphasized word was punctuated by a precise thrust through the squares of the netting, the first striking me in my left shoulder, the second in my right, and the third catching me in the middle of the forehead with a blow that brought tears to my eyes and made it impossible to focus beyond the splintering lights of pain that danced before them.
I thought I heard Meyer gasp and as I clenched my eyes shut, I could feel something wet trickling down the side of my nose. He had hit me with the hollow end of the pipe and the effect was probably not unlike a cookie cutter on dough. That would explain the piercing agony that was drilling against my skull. I braced myself against my own pole as I forced myself back into a standing position, holding it for several seconds before daring to open my eyes and focus on what was beyond the pain. Fortunately, it had the advantage of making the other pains vanish, as I would later find out that my left shoulder, receiving two blows to the right's one, had been broken in several places, and I wouldn't have been able to do what I did next.
At first, it was nothing spectacular. On impulse, I recited the first verse that came to mind, from Psalms 23. I knew it better than almost any other section of the Bible because of an old quilt I once had hanging over my bed as a child that bore its content. Even still, the piercing pain in my forehead made it difficult to recall. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The man's laugh had evaporated and his knowing smile had degenerated into a hateful scowl as the wind picked up again. “He maketh me to lay own in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters, he restoreth my soul. He leadeth me down the path's of righteousness for his name's sake.”
Susan was clawing at her face in agony. “Stop it!” she cried. “Stop it! You're scaring me!” Her begging was like that of a frightened child.
“There's no reason to be scared,” I answered. “For Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.” The wind intensified to near hurricane pitch as the man's scowl deepened, intent on drowning me out and I raised my voice to shout over it. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me!” Despite the winds and despite the pain and despite the blood lifted from my forehead by the forces rushing about me, I stood straight as I lifted that pole above my head in both hands, and though I no doubt looked like some sort of fool, bleeding profusely from my forehead with a tent pole above my head like King Arthur just drawing Excalibur, for that moment, I knew the elation of Moses as he raised his staff above the Red Sea with all the forces of the Pharaoh riding the wind, itself, to bear down on him, to stop him, and knowing it was futile, that they'd never make it. “Thou shalt preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies! Thou shalt annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over!” Above the wind, Susan's cries of agony were the only thing that could be heard, pained pleadings for mercy, for cessation, for pity, but though she grabbed for me, grappled in a vain attempt to bring my arms down, her beautiful face rapidly degenerating in the wind to that dried, dead husk, her screaming never ceasing, she could not stop me. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall live and dwell in the house of the Lord forever!” The wind buffeted me like a thousand fists from giants, pummeling me without mercy, but they could not stop me. With force greater than they could muster, I brought that plain, unassuming tent pole down on the netting between us. “AMEN!”
It shattered like a pane of glass, scattering in all directions, and like a chain reaction, so did Susan, the hooded man and the whole playground of fog and I collapsed against the side of the clean room as the force left me.
From inside the room, I heard the detective swear and he rushed out the door and over to me, all the while demanding, “What the hell did you do?” over and over again. It made me laugh the laugh of the exhausted. The moment he got hold of me, however, it changed, and the next reiteration came out, “What the hell did you do to your forehead?”
It wasn't until he mentioned it that I realized it was still bleeding. I reached up tiredly and ran a finger over the bridge of my nose and drew it back to examine the red mess before letting out another tired laugh. “I think I'm going to need stitches,” I observed.
“No shit, Sherlock,” he muttered angrily before wheeling on the doctors. “I'm done here. Get what you need and get that bitch back in the ground. I'm taking him to the hospital.”
As he walked me over to the squad car and got me inside, it occurred to me that they were morticians, more used to working on the dead than the living, or at least the animated. “She won't give them any trouble over it, will she?” I asked.
But he just scoffed. “Soon as you brought up your god, you both collapsed. She's deader 'n a doornail. I half expected the same of you when you went down with her.”
I stared ahead at the gravel road the headlights shined upon as he started up the engine. “That's all that happened?” I asked confoundedly.
“Yeah,” he answered irritably as he dug out a tissue and handed it to me. “Clamp this on that thing before you bleed all over the car. What the hell did you think happened?”
I gave another one of those tired laughs, though why, I had no idea. What I was about to say wasn't remotely funny. “I found the kids,” I said, as if I expected that to explain it all.
Of course, he just looked at me like the hole in my head had knocked a screw loose. “What kids?”
“The ones that are missing,” I explained. “They're all over that bulletin board back at the station. I know where they are.”
The detective swore again. “You sure?” he demanded. When I nodded, he yanked up the radio, but I put my free hand over his arm. I didn't say anything, but after a moment, he got the idea and clipped the radio back in. “Well, then, I guess it can wait until tomorrow … I've had my fill of the dead for one night ...”
The next day, he went to the next valley over from the graveyard, and in the basement of an old, run-down house that nobody had been in for the better part of the last century, he found the children strung up and quartered like deer from the ceiling.
He had no doubt wanted me to come with him, because he called my house that morning several times. I didn't answer, though, because when I had gotten back home that night, on an impulse I would never have the opportunity to understand, I enjoyed the first glass of strawberry milk I had had in twenty years.
